ZDaemon Thursday Night Survival #488 - Hellevator

 
Hellevator is a fresh community megawad similar in spirit to Going Down - you need to clear hellspawn out of all 30 floors of a building - but this time going up rather than down.

The maps were designed specifically for pistol starts so that's exactly what we're going to do. See you there!
 
DMFLAGS: 1174487140 / 806496256 / 0
Skill: Ultra Violence
IWAD: doom2 or freedoom0_12_1
PWADs: helevtor_beta0_3
Maps: 01-15, 31, 32
Lives: 1
Players: 25/100
Item Respawn Time: 60 seconds
Player Join Limit: 5 minutes
 
Date: 17th December 2020
 
Euro session: 19:00 GMT/14:00 EST at [L@P], Finland
 
Get ZDaemon and join in.

@TeamTNS @Keyboard_Doomer Thank you for organizing the event and everyone else for showing up.
I was wondering how viable would the multiplayer be... and it went more or less as expected. It was fun nonetheless.

 The levels were a little cramped for TNS (there is usually two dozen people), but other than that, I thought the style of Hellevator was very good. It was a really cool theme, and I had a lot of fun playing the maps. Thank you for making such an awesome megawad! My white jock hat if off to the mappers from your community! 

Wow, the absolute chaos. Some of the basic locks can probably be fixed, but the delicate setup of some maps probably won't allow it.

I made some fixes of my maps today that hopefully will prevent people from being softlocked in survival/coop.
Map13 and 26 now have some MP only teleports that open after reaching certain points in the maps that bypass locked arenas or map shifting.

Map22 now has teleports, weapon closets can be opened from the other side by shooting the wall
and a reset switch that opens all weapon paths, middle and secondary demons bars that bypass the single player progression was added.
Now there are 2 ways to beat the map.

1. If players know what to do they can beat the map the same way as was contructed for single player.
2. If reset switch was pressed at any time at least once and all secondary monster closets were activated, red key will be accessable.

Absolute chaos lol

Sorry I couldn't make it this TNS, looks like you had a lot of fun.

I've made some small changes to map10 and map20 to (hopefully) stop those cheeky key bumps. ;-)

I'm still not entirely sure what is up with the red key on MAP29

Does zDaemon have difficult relationship with keys on conveyors?

I had a snoop around. The key won't teleport when there's a monster sitting on the teleport destination.

Try it with -nomonsters and it works.

A teleport loop in the keycard conveyor may fix it, or a destination sector with monster blocking lines?

1 hour ago, ViolentBeetle said:

I'm still not entirely sure what is up with the red key on MAP29

The issue seems to be that the key didn't teleport in because the destination was blocked. Easiest solution is probably to put another WR teleporting line after the present one to keep teleporting the key before line 1784 until it's able to teleport out.

@Shawny

Thanks for taking the time to fix the maps for multiplayer even though I imagine you were not happy to see the intended way to play MAP22 hopelessly broken by us.

1 minute ago, Keyboard_Doomer said:

The issue seems to be that the key didn't teleport in because the destination was blocked.

How comes zdaemon blocks inbound teleports for intangible objects?

^ This is the Boom behavior. It's the same in PrBoom+ -complevel 9.

Does this mean all this time I was testing with complevel 11? I thought 9 was default.

Life is full of mysteries.

Default is -1. Either way, this behavior is the same in PrBoom+ under any complevel that supports teleporting items. Maybe you never encountered this issue because you always killed the mastermind and cyberdemon before pressing the switch releasing the red key? It's also quite likely that for us the issue was that a player happened to block the destination, not a monster.

Well, I added a return teleport. I don't think anyone else did something similar so it should be mostly fine even if somebody might miss out on ammo.

2 hours ago, Keyboard_Doomer said:

Thanks for taking the time to fix the maps for multiplayer even though I imagine you were not happy to see the intended way to play MAP22 hopelessly broken by us.

Hey, truth be told I was already prepared for that the second map22 started loading.

The questions were when and how it´t gonna break not if.

In fact... it was super helpful to see how the map would work first hand.
Good thing is that I had figured out how to "fix" it. The answer is... embrace the chaos rather than trying to make people follow single player rules.

Not sure how effective the solution is in action, but from what I have tested alone in local multiplayer... it works and quite frankly it seems like a decent solution.
And if all players know how the map works and follow that pattern you can still play it as intended if the reset switch is never pressed.

That's nice to hear, then! Maps that rely on a gimmick or specific setup(s) usually don't work very well in multiplayer so it's great to see when the mapper is willing to accommodate the multiplayer crowd and creates a "workaround".